The Unwanted Gaze

The Digital Age has brought abundance to the connected, but one commodity is growing perilously scarce: privacy. The Internet and other information technologies have made sensitive information about individuals' private lives available to employers, vendors, government authorities -- to anyone, in fact, with the right knowledge and a little money. In his new book, Jeffrey Rosen argues that legal, technological, and cultural changes undermine an individual's ability to control how much personal information is communicated to others, and he proposes ways of reconstructing some of the zones of privacy that law and technology have been allowed to invade.

But the question of privacy and the Internet is far from settled in the public debate -- many note that commercial interests have used individuals' information in the pre-Internet, snail mail, analog world, and argue that the standards for use of information have not changed at all. In fact, some make the case that commercial interests can do a better job of fine-tuning the kind of opportunities and information that consumers want thanks to data on their preferences and habits.

A transcript of this event is also available.

Participants

• Jeffrey Rosen. Legal Affairs Editor, The New Republic, & Associate Professor, George Washington University Law School